Social – Arunmozhi

Do Government Teachers Deserve Better Pay Than Private Teachers in Tamilnadu?

Recently Tamilnadu’s government teachers went on a strike and captured the attention of everyone in the state. There were emotions flying from everyone. Around 5 out their 9 demands revolved around money: pay, pension and arrears. An argument which could be heard around was:

Private school teachers do much more work for much less pay, so government school teachers shouldn’t be greedy

Is it really that way? I decided to investigate with whatever little data I could. One key factor that could be used to quantify the workload of teachers is Student-to-Teacher ratio, simply stated, the number of children each teacher is responsible for. Higher the number, more the workload, more notebooks to correct, more exam papers to evaluate, longer queues to handle … you get the idea.

With that in mind, let us put data to work.

Data Used

Calculations

With the above sources giving a neat count of schools, students and teachers based on the management type of the school, it was just a matter of selecting the right columns and dividing one by the other.

Student-to-teacher Ratio = No.of Students / No.of Teachers

I uploaded the dataset to Kaggle and wrote a kernel script to perform the above calculation for each type of schools: Government, Government-Aided, and Private schools.

Observations

Here is the heatmap of the Student to teacher ratios.

There is a clear pattern that can be observed. The government aided school teachers have in some cases twice as much workload as their peers in govt or private schools. Aided school teachers do the work of all the govt. teachers like Census data, Electoral rolls, Election booth staff..etc., too.

Here is graph to give a sense of how far removed are the aided school teachers from their peers.

Conclusion

To answer the question asked in the title. I am not sure about government school teachers, but it certainly looks like the govt. aided school teachers deserve better.

Literacy Gap of SC community in TN districts

I was going through the Census 2011 data once again and Erode district’s low Schedule Caste (SC) literacy rate caught my eyes. It is not a very lagging state when in overall literacy. But its SC literacy was less than the least literate district of Dharmapuri. So I added the data to the TN Districts shapefile and visualised it to see how lagging are the SC community across the districts.

Here are the maps

Correction

In an earlier map, the gap of Thoothukudi was mentioned as -14%, while the actual gap is around 6% due to a typo during the data processing. The map has been updated to reflect the change.

My observations

Kongu Belt (Coimbatore, Tiruppur, Erode) is the worst. ~~The Gounder (land owning) community has ensured their position and the social ladder and ensured the peasantry remained uneducated and illiterate.~~

Update: While there might be an element of truth to it, the maps alone are not indicative of the inference. I have made the above observation based on the number of issue that have appeared on the media like the Mid-day meal staff harassment, two tumbler system etc.,

This observation has been generating a number of comments on the validity of inference without "proof". While the discrimination of SC by dominant caste is the cause for a number of issues, calling out one out of a number of factors is unqualified. https://t.co/8gwFn1ZL5U

— Arunmozhi (@tecoholic) January 14, 2019

Also, I don't want this data & map to be seen as a tool to vilify and demonize a particular community. I regret the wrong message I have conveyed.

— Arunmozhi (@tecoholic) January 14, 2019

Dharmapuri is a peculiar case, it has the lowest overall literacy in TN, but it is also the only district where SC community is more literate than the general population.
Kanniyakumari which tops the overall literacy rates also tops the SC literacy. In fact the SC community of Kanniyakumari is more literate than the general population of almost all other districts. I think it would be an interesting place of humanities research in the area of literacy, education and caste.

Data Source:

http://www.tn.gov.in/deptst/areaandpopulation.pdf

Gaja Relief & Disaster Management Numbers

Cyclone Gaja – this year’s natural disaster which has landed like a stab in the gut for Tamil Nadu.

… Cyclone Gaja is a major disaster, and its economic impact in Tamil Nadu is comparable to that of the tsunami of 2004.
– The Hindu

After the disaster, the Tamil Nadu’s Chief Minister announced a relief package of 1000 Crores for the affected regions. Anyone who hasn’t worked on the Tamil Nadu’s budget for the current financial year wouldn’t be wrong to assume that Tamil Nadu’s disaster relief budget allocation would be greater than the said 1000 Crore. Logically it makes sense, to assume that the government is allocating a part of money kept aside for the purpose. But not in this case, Tamil Nadu has a total allocation of 786 Crores for disaster relief. [Reference: Tamil Nadu Budget 2018-19 Couldn’t find the English version]

Then the CM requested additional 15,000 crores from the Union Government. Now a little bit about the disaster relief funds from the central government. There are two types of funds SDRF (State Disaster Relief Fund) that the union government transfers to the state governments to build the state corpus and NDRF (National Disaster Relief Fund) that the central government uses to provide immediate and temporary relief in case of a national emergency. Here is the relevant page from the union budget.

SDRF = 9382.8 Crores
NDRF = 3660.0 Crores
Total allocation in the budget for the entire country = 13,042.8 Crores

The reality that the numbers tell us is that, with the NDRF size of 3,660 crores and 30 states in the union, it is foolish to expect anything more than 120 to 150 Crores from the central government as disaster relief. Remember, this is the year multiple states like Kerala and Mizoram have already experienced disasters like floods. Put together the NDRF allocation TN will probably get and the entire allocation of TN disaster fund gives us a sum of 150+786 = 936 crores.

The number begs the question – Are the leaders in Tamil Nadu really numerate? Do they even fathom the numbers they are spouting to us in the public? Why would a CM ask for an amount that is bigger than the total union budget (for disaster relief) if he understands fiscal management? Is there no one on the bureaucracy who understands it too?

As a defense one could say, the difference between the available funds in the budget and the relief expenditure would be borrowed now and settled later by the government. But it is hard to buy that defense. ^{[Update 1]}

When there is a genuine way to actually tell the public about the available funds (786 crores) and informing us that 100% of the year’s budget would go to the 11 affected districts and extra funds would be requested from the center, the people in power are quoting random imaginary numbers which they could later serve to serve their own purposes. I wish our media would do this research and ask the hard questions that need to be asked, rather than praising the volunteers.

Update 1:

I thought I would add the rationale to validate why the government won’t be borrowing more money for disaster relief.

The biggest expenditure in the union budget is Interest payment. We have so much debt that 23.58% of the entire budget (or 1/4th) goes into just interest payments.
India is already struggling to meet its fiscal deficit target. Borrowing more is only going to worsen the situation.

So, in practical terms, the argument that govt would somehow find money to finance the disaster relief is void.

Update 2:

The central government has announced a relief package of 353.7 crores for Tamilnadu from the SDRF. This is slightly higher than the amount the union govt should have given the TN govt anyway. SDRF fund 9382.8 shared between 29 states = 323.53 crores. To be clear, this is the amount which would have been given to Tamilnadu anyways. Here is the explanation from the budget document:

The Social Media Dilemma

Woke up today morning and saw this piece on High Frequency Trading. I have already read Michael Lewis’Flash Boys and The Big Short which has kindled a strong dislike towards this HFT, not before dreaming about millions by doing it. When I hit this

We tend to understand the concept of actively using technology to achieve certain ends (exercising agency), but we find it harder to conceptualise the potential loss of agency that technology can bring. It’s a phenomenon perhaps best demonstrated with email: I can use email to exercise my agency in this world, to send messages that make things happen. At the same time, it’s not like I truly have the option to not use email. In fact, if I did not have an email account, I would be severely disabled. There is a contradiction at play: The email empowers me, whilst simultaneously threatening me with disempowerment if I refuse to use it.

my mind automatically went to one point of long time consternation – Facebook. With the recent reports of both Google and Facebook pushing for face recognition technologies and even people at MIT Technology Review are wondering what it means and how people take it, I am more spooked on the issue than I usually am.

The Dilemma

I am trying to setup something which requires inputs from a number of people intellectually, monetarily and personally. And one place where all these people could be reached out easily, coordinated, and followed upon is Facebook. There is no denying it. I have seen a lot of groups coordiante a lot of stuff over there before I deleted my account. It has become so ubiquitous in everyday lives of millions of people that people like me will be looked down as the ‘anti-vaxers’ of the digital connectivity. I am also finding it increasingly hard to explain why I don’t have account, more so when it comes to why I deleted it.

For most people the perceived threat of someone owning our identity in some distant place as one among the millions far outweighs the benefit of being ‘connected’ to friends and family.

The email empowers me, whilst simultaneously threatening me with disempowerment if I refuse to use it.

This sounds so much like

The Facebook empowers me, whilst simultaneously threatening me with disempowerment if I refuse to use it.

The compromise of having to let facebook’s scripts stalk me, monitor me, and feed me what it thinks is good for me in order for me to setup and run things I want to has resulted in a dilemma like no other.

Probable Ways Out

The old way: Restrain from going to FB and do things the old way. Which is call the first person you know, get to know about the next person and from him the next one. So on so forth. While it is entirely doable, it does involve retelling the same story multiple number of times.
Be the hypocrite: Let somebody else do the co-ordination on platforms like Facebook like celebrities do. I don’t think I am that wealthy or famous to hire a SoMe firm. It also involves being a hypocrite for using Facebook and calling it a bad thing.
One among the millions: Throw out all reservations and jump into FB. Let whatever hits the millions hit me.

All the three is equally straining for a variety of reasons. And is killing me.

Net-neutrality. This is why.

This post is a reply to the previous post by me titled Why Net-Neutrality? or Why not tiered pricing?.

After a hour long discussion and debate with a couple of people, these are the things that tell me why net-neutrality is essentially a social issue and not a capitalist one. I am going to outlay the arguments that I made in the previous article and try to point out the flaws and get a better understanding.

1. Greed of companies like Netflix and YouTube

The flaw with the argument “since these services use the ISP’s pipe for their service, they owe a part of income to the ISP” is akin to arguing a runner ran through this road to win his marathon and thus owes a part of the prize to the local government.

The point that it is streaming that clogs the pipe is countered by the argument that it is precisely because of those services, the size of the pipe is getting bigger and definition of broadband internet getting revised to higher speeds.

2. The cost of usage

I have argued the one difference between electric company and ISP is the cost of usage. While an electric equipment doesn’t mean recurring income to the manufacturer, a web service gets an income. Thus there is cost involved in usage of internet services which the ISPs want a slice of.In short, the ISPs are greedy.

Because the initial cost for both the internet and electric connection are very similar. Replace the electric line with a coaxial or CAT line, replace the local transformers with switches and repeaters, replace the high tension substation transformers with the servers of ISP, we have almost exactly the same setup except only electricity is an utility and internet is not

3. More speed more money

I argued why would any ISP want to create a slow lane if they make more money for more speed / more volume. Simply put, why would there be a fast lane and a slow lane?

It seems that it is exactly for the same reason “more speed/volume more money”. In a situation when the ISP can more money why would he be willing to give out a connection involving the same initial costs for a low volume low income connection? The flaw here is assuming that volume/speed is limited and the ISPs are really worried about their precious resource from getting sucked up by the streamers. I should have known better.

Finally

I previously concluded,

I as a layman consumer is completely ok with the current state of affairs and don’t mind if the billing becomes usage based, or someone creates a fast-lane for those who pay more as long as the slow lane is at the mandated minimum speed, which is the present case anyways.

Though I still say the same, I would say it in fewer words – I want a neutral net, which is the present case anyways 🙂

Why Net-Neutrality? Or Why not tiered pricing?

Update: Kindly read the follow up article Net-neutrality. This is why.

I have genuine question. Why net neutrality? I know there are reams of pages of content answering the question, but I am asking from a completely lay man non-techie version of the question. Why? The only answer that I seem to get is – It protects the interests of the consumer.

Interest or Greed?

The current pricing model used by the internet service providers is something akin to an electric connection. They give you a line to use and bill based on the connection speed and the quantity of data or amount of time you spend online. The electric company doesn’t worry whether you use a geyser or lamp as long as you pay the bill. Similarly the present ISP models doesn’t care whether you stream YouTube or read Wikipedia. The analogy seems extremely apt, except for one difference – the cost of usage.

In case of an electric connection, you buy any equipment that you want to use and pay the cost of the hardware. The more you use the more the electric company gains, the equipment manufacturer gets nothing most of the time. Exceptions like cable TV exist, but again cable is another utility altogether and we will get into that shortly. But in case of the ISP, you buy services over its line which earns money for those services. In this case it is completely opposite; the ISP gains almost no money no matter how much you use any kind of service over their lines.
For example, using geyser on a daily basis could consume a lot of energy and prove to be great revenue for the electric company, whereas streaming movies 24×7 is going to benefit only Netflix of YouTube and does nothing to the ISP except choking their lines.

The ISPs this want to take a part of the money paid to the service as it also utilizes on their resource. The invention of thing like Fair Usage Policy (FUP) is a way to limit this choking of the lines.
So when companies like Google talk about net neutrality (against tired pricing), the real question is whether the company is really trying to protect the consumer or just trying to enjoy the free ride that it currently enjoys.

The Cable TV Pricing

From a consumer standpoint this is certainly against the interest because we don’t really want to pay more for certain services. It is time we visit the cable TV evolution and see what the consumer really has said and done about it.

Initially there were there was only one way of getting satellite TV – Using a Dish Antenna. The intial investment was huge. Then came cable operators, who charged a certain amount of fees for certain number of channels, no choices, all just paid an amount. After that came the Direct to Home (DTH) services replacing the cable TV operator with a corporate body. Until to this day we pay per channel, called packages. And the customer has hopped on merrily with some noises here and there. Nothing in the transition has affected the channels’ (services) revenue.

Applying the same route, we are currently in the cable operator state, where the ISP is giving us a cable, we pay an amount. If the model evolves into one which prices textual data, VOIP, and media streaming at different rates, like that of a channel based DTH pricing, and bills the consumer on what is consumed, a lot of people would might end up paying a lot more as well as a lot less. Just as I avoid all sports channels, I might avoid all VOIP usage. If I am programmer, most of my requirement is software package and code, there is no need for me to pay more. But people preferring YouTube to TV would pay a lot, and thus reduce revenue to business like Apple TV, Google TV, Netflix, etc., but taking away a share of the pie. So for me a consumer, paying on how much traffic I use seems as much legit as big truck paying more than car on a toll road, simply because I use more resource.

This argument so seems biased towards ISPs. What if things like the ones below, said in Wikipedia, happens?

From Wikipedia
Neutrality proponents claim that telecom companies seek to impose a tiered service model in order to control the pipeline and thereby remove competition, create artificial scarcity, and oblige subscribers to buy their otherwise uncompetitive services.

From HuffingtonPost
A fast lane would let some websites operate at higher speeds and essentially relegate many sites — likely smaller, less-moneyed ones — to a slower pace.

Where are the regulatory authorities who enforce mobile communication and telecommunication pricing? Why such an authority can’t be created and clear rules saying what could and couldn’t be charged drafted? Why can’t things like slow lanes be completely outlawed? Say we create a law which says Non-profit sites like Wikipedia, Khan Academy should never be charged (extra) even for streaming content and pricing can only be done on For-profit entities like YouTube and Netflix. Calls for making internet a utility are a step in this direction of regulation. Why would anyone really want to create a slow-lane if more speed and more data transfer results in more money for the utility provider?

So.,

The entire thing about raising hue and cry over differentiated pricing seems to be for only one reason – Greed.
The greed of the companies to make money. They pull us, consumers, into the issue by terrifying us that our bills would shoot sky high and ISPs will fleece consumer. If that is the real issue, I think it is better dealt by talking to (or even creating new) regulatory authorities, consumer protection agencies and other similar governmental organizations and certainly not by tactfully converting a purely capitalistic issue a social issue involving rights and freedom.

I as a layman consumer is completely ok with the current state of affairs and don’t mind if the billing becomes usage based, or someone creates a fast-lane for those who pay more as long as the slow lane is at the mandated minimum speed, which is the present case anyways.

Facebook Account Deletion

I just now deleted my Facebook account.

Why?

Freedom – Day by day using it makes me feel as if someone is dictating me how and what I should be talking to people about. The rampant, out of the blue censors by law enforcement and judiciary are the reasons. Even though I have never been a part of any such action, the atmosphere is getting too toxic over there in that domain.
Irrelevancy – Most of the content that I encounter on my timeline are completely irrelevant to me and the only content that I engage with are blogs like Lifehacker and posts of a set of very few friends, both of which I think I can do without having to endure a non-free environment.
Privacy – It has been a great concern for me ever since I became aware of its importance and ethics. Somehow kept telling myself, nothing would affect me. I think underestimating risks is something I am unwilling to do these days after reading “Fooled by Randomness“.
Paranoia – Closely connected to “Privacy” – I was always thinking what if someday I discover that all the stuff that I have shared is sold/shared to someone and that someone uses it for purposes I never suppose it to be? Am I planning murder? No. But what if someone frames me for it? I am NOT paranoid by nature, I walk 1 among the billion+ in the country. But again, not all billion+ walk around recording data about what they read, where they go and what they think.
Narcissism – One of the biggest effect of Facebook on character is, I think, breeding narcissism. It breeds a kind of self importance and provides an easy sense of achievement and forces a person to project a personality, real or otherwise. This becomes especially stressful when considering the fact when one is connected to all sorts of people from high school friends to working colleagues. A few recent encounters with people has left a bad taste in mouth about the whole “sharing” thing.
Spam – Spam, spam, spam – there is just no end to it. I am generally very efficient in ignoring Ads and spam because all that I look for is content from people and never click any link other than blog-posts. But most of the time genuine and original content is very hard to come by and all sorts of false claims on history, technology, identity creep in along with celebrity, movie and all sorts of eye-ball catching stuff.

After considering all this, the most logical decision to make seems to be to leave the system and reduce a lot of responses that brain generates due to unnecessary stimuli.

Will I ever get on a social network again?

I currently do not have an answer to that. There are a lot of things to be considered as listed above and see how they play out to make a decision. With the current turmoil of internet censorship across the world, misuse of it as tools of destruction, authoritative control, capitalist bait holder, and as an enterprise looking to make money indirectly by using my data, I don’t think I am getting onto it (FB) any time soon. I specifically mean FB here because, there exists an alternate platform called Diaspora* which deals with all of my above concerns (okay, maybe not narcissism), but jumping into such a platform is pointless if I don’t really have the people I want to interact.

Pampering kids

There are two kids in my class who have better reading, writing comprehension skills that half the class, which should make them “above-average” in conventional sense. Both have a problem – attitude. Their parents tell me they were the toppers of the yesteryear. I had given C-D grades to them during the 1st term exam and the parents were very upset. I didn’t know the kids this well back then and thought them to be just normal kids. As the parents coming barging in with complaints and pointing fingers at me, I was taken aback thinking I was perhaps not seeing them as to what they are capable of doing. I was apprehensive of meeting their parents thinking that it was my fault. Perhaps I have made a bad evaluation of their papers. I was just three months into being a teacher.

Recently an incident put things in perspective. I have taken the kids to play in the ground, while I was keeping scores and overseeing stuff other kids were doing, these two have sneaked up to the first floor and have gone to the classroom. I was perplexed when I found this out at the end of the class. When I reached the classroom with the other kids, one of the two has hit the leg on the desk and has been crying.

The parent was furious – obviously. The parent went on to praise the child to be the one who always gets the first rank, scores well in everything, has got a shield for something and the other kid was the one who was always a competition to the first kid. These two were supposedly the toppers of the class. Now a days the kid is not willing/interested to come to school. Doesn’t seem to eat the lunch properly. Handwriting has deteriorated. Looks dull in the evening when the kids returns home. All symptoms of kid not enjoying the school and then the word came “teacher not taking good care of the child”. I was left wondering for a second what the parent actually meant. These kids are the ones who always create problems in the class. The kid in discussion has been said to be a great pain in their team and the kid barely pays attention in the class to what I am saying. Most of the time I get distracted trying to bring their attention. Slowly as the conversation progressed one thing became clear. These were kids who have been in the limelight most of the time in yesteryear(s) and here is a teacher who refuses to accept the fact and give the attention they think they deserve.

I am thinking about a number of other kids who are attention seeking as well and get themselves a place in the class. They get more warnings and consequences in the classroom than others. But there is one categorical difference with them and these kids. Their parents don’t praise them as simple as that. No pampering whatsoever. Their parents talk about what the kid should improve but not how great they have done. When these parents were told their kids have secured “A”s their reply was “OK”. Didn’t utter a “very good” or that “He/She reads well” kind of comment.

Such a difference in behavior.